The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 71





Apparently, though, Billy wasn’t going to kill her.

Not yet, at any rate.

It was ink, not poison, he’d loaded into the tattoo gun.

‘Stop fidgeting,’ he instructed. He was on his knees in front of the couch she lay on.

Pam said, ‘My hands hurt behind me. Please. Undo the tape. Please.’

‘No.’

‘Just tape them in front of me.’

‘No. Stay still.’ He glared and she stopped squirming.

‘What the f*ck are—’

Another fierce slap. ‘We have an image to maintain. Do you understand me? You will never use the F word and you will never take that tone!’ He gripped her hair and shook her head like prey in a fox’s mouth. ‘From now on your role is to be my woman. Our people will see you by my side. The loyal wife.’

He returned to the inking.

Pam thought of screaming but she was sure he’d beat the crap out of her if she tried. Besides, there was no one else in the building. One unit was empty and the other tenants were on a cruise.

He was speaking to her absently. ‘We’ll have to go deep underground for a while. My aunt and uncle won’t give me up. But my cousin, Joshua? It’s just a matter of time until he gets tricked into telling them everything he knows. Me included. We can’t go back to Southern Illinois. Your friend Lincoln will have the FBI picking up all the senior people at the AFFC now. And he’ll suspect the Larchwood crowd again, so Missouri’s out. We’ll have to go someplace else. Maybe the Patriot Assembly in upstate New York. They’re pretty much off the grid.’ He turned to her. ‘Or Texas. There’re people there who remember my parents as martyred freedom fighters. We could live with them.’

‘But, Seth—’

‘We’ll lie low for a few years. Call me “Seth” again and I’ll hurt you. I can do tattooing work for cash. You can teach Sunday school. Little by little we can reemerge. New identities. The AFFC’s over now, but maybe it’s just as well – we’ll move on. Start a new movement. And do a hell of a better job. We’ll do it the right way. We’ll place our women into schools – and I don’t just mean church schools. I mean public and private. Get the kids young. Break them in. We men will run for office, low level, cities and counties – at first. We’ll start local and then move up. Oh, it’s going to be a whole new world. You don’t think that way now. But you’ll be proud to be part of it.’

He lifted the machine off her leg, looked over the work and returned to inking her.

‘My uncle was backward in a lot of ways. But he had one moment of genius. He came up with the Rule of Skin. He’d lecture about it all over the country – at other militias, at revival meetings, at churches, at hunting camps.’ Billy’s eyes shone. ‘The Rule of Skin … It’s brilliant. Think about it: Skin tells us about our physical health, right? It’s flushed or pale. Glowing or dull. Shrunken or swollen. Broken out or clear … And it tells us our spiritual development too. And intellectual. And emotional. White is good and smart and noble. Black and brown and yellow are subversive and dangerous.’

‘You can’t be serious!’

He made a fist and Pam cringed and fell silent.

‘You want proof. The other day I was in the Bronx and this guy stopped me. A young man, I don’t know. About your age. Black. He had keloids on his face – scars, like tattoos. They were beautiful. A real artist had done them.’ His eyes looked off slightly. ‘And you know why he stopped me? To sell me drugs. That’s the truth about people like that. The Rule of Skin. You can’t fool it.’

Pam laughed bitterly. ‘A black kid tried to sell you drugs in the Bronx? Guess what? Go to West Virginia and a white kid’ll try to sell you drugs.’

Billy wasn’t listening. ‘There’s been an argument about Hitler: whether he genuinely hated Jews and Gypsies and gays and wanted to make the world a better place by eliminating them. Or whether he didn’t actually care but thought that German citizens hated them, so he used that hate and fear to seize power.’

‘You’re holding up Hitler as a role model?’

‘There are worse choices.’

‘So? What is it for you, Billy? Do you believe in the Rule of Skin or are you using it for power, for yourself, your ego?’

‘Isn’t it clear?’ He gave a laugh. ‘You’re smarter than that, Pam.’

She said nothing and he dabbed the tears of pain off her cheeks. And she did know the answer. And something occurred to her, hit her like one of his blows. It had to do with the blog she and Seth had worked on together. She whispered, ‘Our blog? That’s the opposite of everything you’re saying. What … what did you create the blog for?’


‘What do you think? Everybody who posts a favorable comment is on our list. Pro-abortion, pro food stamps, pro immigration reform. Their day of judgment’s coming.’

There were probably fifteen thousand people who’d posted something on the site. What was going to happen to them? Would Billy’s followers track them down and kill them? Firebomb their houses or apartments?

Billy set the tattoo gun aside, smeared Vaseline on the ink on her thighs and blotted.

He smiled and said, ‘Look. What do you think?’

Reading upside down, she saw two words on the front of her thighs.

PAM

WIL



What the hell was he doing? What did he mean?

And he pulled his jeans down. She read similar tattoos on his thighs, in matching type fonts.

ELA

LIAM



When read together:

PAM ELA

WIL LIAM



‘We call them splitters. Lovers get parts of their names tattooed on each other. They can only be read when they’re together. It’s us, see? Separately, we’re missing something. Together, we’re whole.’ What passed for a smile crossed his sallow face.

‘Lovers?’ she whispered. Looking at his inking – it’d been done years ago.

He was gazing at her confused face. He pulled up his, then her pants, and zippered and buttoned them.

‘I knew someday I’d get you back.’ Billy was gesturing at the tattoos. ‘“Pamela”, “William”. Nice touch, don’t you think? Our names will be whole when we lie together to make our children.’

He noted her expression of dismay. ‘What’s that look about?’ As if speaking to a daughter upset about a bad day at school.

‘I loved you!’ she cried.

‘No, you loved somebody who was part of the cancer of this country.’ His eyes softened and he whispered, ‘What about me, Pam? The woman I’ve loved all my life turns out to be the enemy? They took your mind and heart away from me.’

‘Nobody changed me. I never believed what my mother did. What you believe.’

He stroked her hair, smiling, murmuring, ‘You were brainwashed. I understand that. I’ll fix you, honey. I’ll bring you back into the fold. Now let’s go pack.’

‘All right, all right.’

He pulled her to her feet.

She turned and looked into his eyes. ‘You know, Billy,’ she said in a soft voice.

‘What?’ He seemed pleased to note her smile.

‘You should’ve checked my pockets.’

Pam swung her right arm toward his face as hard as she could, holding tight, fiercely tight, to the box cutter she’d used to cut through the duct tape – the same as she’d carried in her hip pocket ever since those terrible days in Larchwood.

The blade connected with Billy’s cheek and mouth. Not like the slush sound of a stabbing in movies. Only the silent cutting of flesh.

As he howled and gripped his face, spinning away, Pam leapt over the coffee table and headed for the front door, calling, ‘Okay, there’s a mod for you, a*shole.’